And...

Report: States With Stand Your Ground Laws Have More Homicides
If you’re interested in reducing violent crime, homicides, or racial bias, you should repeal Stand Your Ground laws, according to new recommendations from an American Bar Association Task Force. In a diplomatic fashion, the 62-page preliminary report hedges from calling for the outright repeal of the controversial “shoot first” provisions, but instead suggests that the laws are a “solution searching for a problem,” that they are associated with increased homicide rates and reinforce racial bias, and that any state concerned with these problems should probably do something about it.

Disaster Sociologists Study How Hurricane Sandy Changed Life In New York
Hurricane Sandy has ushered in big changes all over the New York metropolitan region, from seawalls to city ordinances. It may have also changed things in the Ivory Tower.

Supported by New York University and its Institute for Public Knowledge, a young cadre of social scientists calling themselves the Superstorm Research Lab is quietly rethinking business as usual in academia. Though their work fits squarely in the established field of disaster sociology, the Research Lab is deeply invested in pushing the boundaries between scholarly research and efforts to make real change.

Read the white paper:  A Tale of Two Sandys

Sex Offender Laws Have Gone Too Far
"Our draconian policies about sex offenses reflect our ignorance of them."

"Is the American approach to sex registration working? Who goes on the registries, for how long, and for what kinds of crimes? Do the answers suggest that they are helping to keep kids safe—or sweeping in too many people and stoking irrational fears?"

Author of "Broken Windows" Policing Defends His Theory
In 1982, after another year of record lawlessness in New York City, two college professors advanced — or, more accurately, rekindled — a plausibly uncomplicated theory that would revolutionize law enforcement in the city: Maintaining public order also helps prevent crime.

European Court Finds CIA Interrogation Techniques "Amounted To Torture"
The European Court of Human Rights concludes that so-called enhanced interrogation techniques - specifically approved by John Yoo and Jay Bybee for use by the CIA on Abu Zubaydah at a Polish black site - amounted to torture.

The Draw Of the Undertow:  Extremity, Otherness And Emergent Harm In Gaming And Pornography
"My own interest in the cultural and social impact of video games probably began with morally conflicted feelings while playing Grand Theft Auto III for the first time. I remember experiencing a real sense of surprise at the possibility of running over pedestrians and perhaps more so, a sense of worry at what other, younger, players might take from the game. The game felt like an incredibly violent space, a bleak vision of a city without moral codes or goodness, a space most of all where we were being goaded to bring out our more callous side, running over the homeless in tunnels, sniping at the unsuspecting or beating and stabbing to advance, or just for the sheer hell of it."

 

West Point study on ‘violent far right’ shows ‘dramatic rise’ in attacks

A report published by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point Military Academy on Jan. 15 discusses the potential dangers of “violent far-right” organizations, which has angered some conservatives that believe the military should focus on international threats.

The executive summary of the paper, “Challengers from the Sidelines: Understanding America’s Violent Far-Right,” claims that “since 2007, there has been a dramatic rise in the number of attacks and violent plots originating from individuals and groups who self- identify with the far-right of American politics.”

Written by Arie Perliger, Director of Terrorism Studies at the Combating Terrorism Center and an Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Sciences at West Point, the paper asserts that three distinct ideologies exist in the “American violent far right.” Those are “a racist/white supremacy movement, an anti-federalist movement and a fundamentalist movement,” the last of which “includes mainly Christian Identity groups such as the Aryan Nations.”

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Well, at least we know we're free

As long as we don't take photographs in public:

Q.
It seems like photographing in public is becoming a crime.

A.Literally every day, someone is being arrested for doing nothing more than taking a photograph in a public place. It makes no sense to me. Photography is an expression of free speech.

Since 9/11, there’s been an incredible number of incidents where photographers are being interfered with and arrested for doing nothing other than taking pictures or recording video in public places.

It’s not just news photographers who should be concerned with this. I think every citizen should be concerned. Tourists taking pictures are being told by police, security guards and sometimes other citizens, “Sorry, you can’t take a picture here.” When asked why, they say, “Well, don’t you remember 9/11?”

I remember it quite well, but what does that have do to with taking a picture in public? It seems like the war on terrorism has somehow morphed into an assault on photography.

Read on....

Fact-Check: How the NYPD Overstated Its Counterterrorism Record

The NYPD is regularly held up as one of the most sophisticated and significant counterterrorism operations in the country. As evidence of the NYPD's excellence, the department, its allies, and the media have repeatedly said the department has thwarted or helped thwart 14 terrorist plots against New York City since September 11.

In a glowing profile of Commissioner Ray Kelly published in Newsweek last month, for example, journalist Christopher Dickey wrote of the commissioner's tenure since taking office in 2002: The record "is hard to argue with: at least 14 full-blown terrorist attacks have been prevented or failed on Kelly's watch."

The figure has been cited repeatedly in the media, by New York congressmen, and by Kelly himself. The NYPD itself has published the full list, saying terrorists have "attempted to kill New Yorkers in 14 different plots."

As Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in March: "We have the best police department in the world, and I think they show that every single day and we have stopped 14 attacks since 9/11 fortunately without anybody dying."

Is it true?

In a word, no.

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The black hole of Guantanamo

When killing becomes routine, I guess they feel the need to desecrate. There's nothing particularly new in this --- except the laws against it.

That's just awful. That it comes on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantanamo makes it all the worse.

Dahlia Lithwick has an excellent piece up about that tragic decision and the legal fallout, which contains many insights, this one especially:

The paradox of Guantanamo has always been that it’s been invisible to so many Americans, and yet the only thing the rest of the world sees. The whole point of the prison camp there was to create a legal black hole. We’ve fished our wish: The world sees only blackness; we see only a hole.

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My Guantánamo Nightmare

By LAKHDAR BOUMEDIENE

ON Wednesday, America’s detention camp at Guantánamo Bay will have been open for 10 years. For seven of them, I was held there without explanation or charge. During that time my daughters grew up without me. They were toddlers when I was imprisoned, and were never allowed to visit or speak to me by phone. Most of their letters were returned as “undeliverable,” and the few that I received were so thoroughly and thoughtlessly censored that their messages of love and support were lost.

Some American politicians say that people at Guantánamo are terrorists, but I have never been a terrorist. Had I been brought before a court when I was seized, my children’s lives would not have been torn apart, and my family would not have been thrown into poverty. It was only after the United States Supreme Court ordered the government to defend its actions before a federal judge that I was finally able to clear my name and be with them again.

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Why You Can Be Branded a Terrorist for Fighting Animal Abuse

The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act has had a chilling effect on activists scared to participate in what should be constitutionally protected activity.

Five longtime activists are challenging a federal law that defines a wide spectrum of peaceful – and in some cases, otherwise lawful – animal rights activism as acts of terrorism. They say that the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) violates their First Amendment right to free speech and has had a chilling effect on activists who are refraining from participating in what should be constitutionally protected activity out of fear of being labeled a terrorist.

They have good reason to worry. In 2009, the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force arrested and indicted four California protesters for terrorism, each of whom faced 10 years in prison. Their crimes? They “marched, chanted, and chalked” sidewalk slogans outside the homes of animal researchers and distributed fliers about their campaign.

In 2010, federal judge Ronald M. Whyte dismissed the indictments, agreeing with the defense that the charges were too vague because the “behavior in question spans a wide spectrum from criminal conduct to constitutionally protected political protest.” Nevertheless, AETA continues to pose a threat to those participating in animal rights advocacy.

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"Don't Be Fooled": The Indefinite Detention Bill DOES Apply to American Citizens on U.S. Soil

Even at this 11th hour - when all of our liberties and freedom are about to go down the drain - many people still don't understand that the indefinite detention bill passed by Congress allows indefinite detention of Americans on American soil.

The bill is confusing. As Wired noted on December 1st:

It’s confusing, because two different sections of the bill seem to contradict each other, but in the judgment of the University of Texas’ Robert Chesney — a nonpartisan authority on military detention — “U.S. citizens are included in the grant of detention authority.”

A retired admiral, Judge Advocate General and Dean Emeritus of the University of New Hampshire School of Law also says that it applies to American citizens on American soil.

The ACLU notes:

Don’t be confused by anyone claiming that the indefinite detention legislation does not apply to American citizens. It does. There is an exemption for American citizens from the mandatory detention requirement (section 1032 of the bill), but no exemption for American citizens from the authorization to use the military to indefinitely detain people without charge or trial (section 1031 of the bill). So, the result is that, under the bill, the military has the power to indefinitely imprison American citizens, but it does not have to use its power unless ordered to do so.

But you don’t have to believe us. Instead, read what one of the bill’s sponsors, Sen. Lindsey Graham said about it on the Senate floor: “1031, the statement of authority to detain, does apply to American citizens and it designates the world as the battlefield, including the homeland.”

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G20 conspiracy plea deal would see 11 walk free; three from Kitchener and Guelph face jail

TORONTO — The 17 alleged co-conspirators accused of plotting the G20 mayhem have struck a plea bargain with prosecutors that would see 11 defendants walk free and the other six face jail terms of less than two years, according to the Toronto Star.

But the six pleading guilty under the deal — including three from Kitchener and Guelph — would not be pleading to conspiracy, the crime with which they were initially charged. Instead, they would be pleading to the lesser crime of counselling to commit an indictable offence.

Recommended sentences under the plea deal are between six and 20 months.

The position now being taken by the Crown is “drastically different” from how the 17 were portrayed at bail hearings, said lawyer Howard Morton, whose client, Joanna Adamiak, will see her charges dropped as part of the deal.

“This was nothing more than an attempt to create a public image that these people are terrorists,” Morton said of the prosecution’s portrayal of the 17 activists and self-described anarchists.

“These people are anything but terrorists. I mean, I wonder if any of them would even survive anarchy.”

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How Half of Terror Cases Investigated By the FBI ... Were Also Hatched by the FBI

Here is an important question: What single organization is responsible for more terror plots in the USA than any other?

Possible answers: Al Qaida. That would no doubt be the popular answer but it would be wrong. The KKK. Way past their prime, so that is not it. The Jewish Defense League. Good guess, but still not it. So what is the correct answer?

It is the Federal Bureau of Investigation, AKA the FBI. Don’t believe me? Well, just read Trevor Aaronson’s expose entitled “The Informants” published in the September/October 2011 issue of Mother Jones.

Read on...

How to Spot a Terrorist

By JOHN FARMER Jr.

A YOUNG man walks into a Home Depot and buys a large quantity of acetone. Later, a young man walks into a beauty supply store and buys hydrogen peroxide. Still later, a young man is observed parked outside a nondescript federal building in a rented van, taking photographs.

No crime has been committed. But should any of these activities (acetone and hydrogen peroxide can be components for explosives) be reported to and evaluated by law enforcement officials? If they are reported, the government may infringe on privacy and civil liberties. If they are not, we might not know until it’s too late whether it was the same young man in each instance. We might miss the next Timothy McVeigh.

This dilemma was at the heart of hearings before the Senate Homeland Security Committee last week, in which several federal officials warned that “homegrown terrorists” represent the nation’s greatest emerging threat. According to the F.B.I. director, Robert Mueller, Al Qaeda “has looked to recruit Americans or Westerners who are able to remain undetected by heightened security measures.” This reality has led Janet Napolitano, the secretary of Homeland Security, to conclude that “homeland security begins with hometown security.” And hometown security begins with locally based observations of “suspicious” activity. So, can we encourage such observation without also encouraging a disregard for privacy and constitutional rights?

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This is a New York Times op-ed piece. Tom

Terrorists in South Carolina Must Register Before Overthrowing Government

(ChattahBox)—The State of South Carolina, home to Appalachian Trial hiker Governor Mark Sanford, and “You Lie” Joe Wilson wants to keep track of terrorists and subversives residing in the Palmetto state. And in a stroke of bureaucratic Orwellian genius, lawmakers have found a way to monitor terrorist activity. It’s called the “Subversive Activities Registration Act,” and requires that subversives pay a $5.00 filing fee and register with the Secretary of State, before overthrowing the government. Genius, right?

The South Carolina blog FitsNews, was right on top of this latest development in a bible-thumping state that has its share of colorful characters and right-wing political blockheads. Just recently, Republican Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, who is making a run for governor, compared hungry poor people in his state to stray cats and dogs who breed when fed.

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Here's the link to the law. Hat tip Tony Doob. Tom

Watering Torture Down

Why are the media so happy to use the T word in a child-abuse case?

By Dahlia Lithwick

Dick Cheney

There's a good deal of towel-snapping going on in the blogosphere today over rampant use of the word water-boarding to describe the punishment an Iraq war veteran meted out to his 4-year-old daughter. What is not in dispute is that Joshua Tabor, a U.S. Army sergeant who served in Iraq for 15 months, was arrested on Jan. 31 and charged with assaulting a child for, among other things, holding his small daughter's head over a bathroom sink and dunking her for refusing to say her alphabet. Also not in dispute is that almost 200 media outlets, by recent count—including ABC.com, CBS.com, the New York Daily News, and the Daily Mail—used the word water-boarding in their Tabor story, often in the headline. Unwilling to go quite that far, other publications tried to make the same point a bit more subtly: AFP thus put quotation marks around water-boarding and USA Today's headline doubles down by using those same quotation marks plus the word mock. CNN.com, the outlier playing it safe, just stuck with abused.

So what is it the bloggers are yelling about? As Jared Keller at the Atlantic explains, a fight promptly broke out over whether Tabor's conduct is actually water-boarding, with Andrew Sullivan warning that "[n]o doubt Marc Thiessen [former speechwriter for George W. Bush] will object that since she wasn't strapped to an actual board and only dunked three or four times, rather than 183, and her father wasn't in the CIA, she wasn't really waterboarded." As Sullivan predicted, various right-wing bloggers flipped out because it isn't technically water-boarding if the victim isn't variously "strapped to a board" and the act isn't performed "by professionals in controlled conditions" while a "cloth is placed over the face and water is poured over the cloth."

Read on...

This is what happens when you have the media and the highest levels of government defending, promoting and justifying torture. Tom

ACLU Sues Over Unconstitutional Airport Detention And Interrogation Of College Student Carrying Arabic Flashcards

Incident At Philadelphia Airport Highlights Misdirected Security Efforts, Says ACLU

ACLU Sues Over Unconstitutional Airport Detention And Interrogation Of College Student Carrying Arabic Flashcards

PHILADELPHIA – The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Pennsylvania today filed a lawsuit on behalf of Pomona College student Nicholas George, who was abusively interrogated, handcuffed and detained for nearly five hours at the Philadelphia International Airport because of a set of English-Arabic flashcards he was carrying in connection with his college language studies.

"Arresting and restraining passengers who pose no threat to flight safety and are not breaking any law not only violates people's rights, but it won't make us any safer. It may actually make us less safe, by diverting vital resources and attention away from true security threats," said Ben Wizner, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. "Nick George was handcuffed, locked in a cell for hours and questioned about 9/11 simply because he has chosen to study Arabic, a language that is spoken by hundreds of millions of people around the world. This sort of harassment of innocent travelers is a waste of time and a violation of the Constitution."

Read on...

Chapter 4 - A Ponzi Scheme of Torture

By Larry Siems

Created 02/03/2010 - 11:48

This chapter connects the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah, Jose Padilla, and Binyam Mohamed, three people who were allegedly involved in a ‘dirty bomb' plot that grew more fantastical the more the men were tortured. It traces how torture begat torture, first because bad information extracted through abusive interrogations led to more torture and more bad information, and finally because interrogations were being conducted not only, as the Bush administration has insisted, to produce new intelligence to thwart impending attacks but also to force confessions and extract information that it would use to justify its detention and torture of others.

At the center of this Chapter's “Ponzi scheme of torture” is Binyam Mohamed, a UK-based Ethiopian émigré who was arrested in Pakistan in April 2002, abused, flown to Morocco and tortured for 18 months, then flown to a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan , where he was again tortured, and finally delivered, in September 2004, to Guantánamo. Once called Jose Padilla's accomplice in several diabolical terror plots and identified, with Abu Zubaydah, as the source of information about those planned attacks, Mohamed was released last year and is now living as a free man in London.

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Rendition Victim Moves to Sue US

A Canadian man who was deported by US officials to Syria, where he was imprisoned and allegedly tortured, has appealed a court ruling preventing him from suing the US.

Arar was deported to Syria by US authorities where he was allegedly tortured. (Associated Press)

Maher Arar filed a lawsuit before the US supreme court on Monday, appealing a lower court ruling that rejected his case because it involved national security information.

Arar was arrested by US authorities while transiting through New York's JFK International Airport in 2002, on his way home to Canada from a family vacation in Tunis.

He was detained on information shared by Canadian police that suggested he had ties to "terrorist" groups.

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Too Terrible To Be True?

Why aren't we talking about the new accusations of murder at Gitmo?

By Dahlia Lithwick

Guantanamo Bay military prison

Some torture stories are just too horrible to contemplate, while others are too complicated to understand. But Scott Horton's devastating new exposé of the possible murders of three prisoners at Guantanamo in 2006 is neither: It's simply too terrible to allow to be true. Which is why it has been mostly ignored this week in the mainstream American media and paid little attention by the usual crew of torture apologists on the right. The fact that three Guantanamo prisoners—none of whom had any links to terrorism and two of whom had already been cleared for release—may have been killed there and the deaths covered up, should be front-page news. That brand-new evidence of this possible atrocity from military guards was given only the most cursory investigation by the Obama administration should warrant some kind of blowback. But changing what we allow ourselves to believe about torture would change the way we have reconciled ourselves to torture. Nobody in this country is prepared to do that. So we have opted to ignore it.

If you haven't read Horton's piece, you should. Here is Andy Worthington's summary. Following up on a study released in December by Mark Denbeaux at Seton Hall, Horton chases down yet more evidence—much of it from four camp guards—that three "suicides" alleged to have happened in a single night at Gitmo in June 2006 were not actually suicides at all. As the Seton Hall study concluded, the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service report on the incident that was issued in 2008 was quite literally beyond belief. Horton writes:

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Justice Denied: Eight Years and Counting

By Suzanne Ito Monday Jan 11, 2010 7:00pm

Eight years ago today, a Department of Defense C-141 transport plane carrying 20 prisoners arrived in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. On that day, January 11, 2002, the naval base began operating as a detention center for men captured in President Bush's so-called "war on terror."

Since that day, nearly 800 prisoners, men as old as 98 and boys as young as 13, have passed through Gitmo. The notorious prison camp has seared into the mind of the world images of hooded, goggled, orange-jumpsuit-clad prisoners shackled in cages. Guantánamo has become synonymous with torture and abuse. Its very existence is a symbol of disregard for the rule of law.

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Manhattan TransferThe right's nonsensical arguments against trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York.

By Dahlia Lithwick

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

Opposition to the Obama administration's plan to try alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his confederates in a federal court in New York City is hardening into two camps. One is concerned that we may be unwittingly playing into the terrorists' hands. The other is incensed that we already have. What both camps share, besides a kind of unhinged logic and complete disregard for the legal process, is an obsessive fascination with the accused. The result is a broad willingness to sacrifice our commitment to legal principles in favor of the symbolic satisfaction of crushing the hopes and dreams of a motley group of criminals.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, firmly in the first camp, is hopping mad that we are poised to make all the suspect's dreams come true. As he said on ABC's This Week: "Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, when he was first arrested, asked to be brought to New York. I didn't think we were in the business of granting the requests of terrorists."

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There is also a fear that as all the torture evidence gets entered into court, George Bush and his buddies might face some legal jeopardy. Tom

A National Disgrace

Editorial

Two courts, one in Italy and one in the United States, ruled recently on the Bush administration’s practice of extraordinary rendition, which is the kidnapping of people and sending them to other countries for interrogation — and torture. The Italian court got it right. The American court got it miserably wrong.

In Italy, a judge ruled that a station chief for the Central Intelligence Agency and 22 other Americans broke the law in the 2003 abduction of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, a Muslim cleric who ended up in Egypt, where he said he was tortured.

Two days earlier, a federal appeals court in Manhattan brushed off a lawsuit by Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who was seized in an American airport by federal agents acting on bad information from Canadian officials. He was held incommunicado and harshly interrogated before being sent to Syria, where he was tortured. He spent almost a year in a grave-size underground cell before the Syrians let him go.

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A New York Times editorial. Tom